On The Tourist Trail at Easter

The Easter School Holidays and Bank Holiday arrived, for a busy family that meant four days of day trips and touring around doing as much as possible together as we could.

Daily picnics, cycling, walking, sightseeing, two days of National Trust properties and Easter Egg Trails ensued, across Counties Antrim, Down and Londonderry.

One of the spots we recently visited was the Springhill Estate in County Londonderry which has an interesting costume museum and a good ghost story. One particular bedroom is believed to be haunted by a previous lady of the house. The story as we heard it is that the woman's husband was considered to have committed suicide in the bedroom. A later visitor to the house reported a noise from behind the bed and an apparition in the room. Many years later the bed moved was moved to a different spot and the room stripped for redecoration. A secret door was discovered. The door led to a staircase and at the bottom of the staircase a sachet of gunpowder and a pair of gloves with the initials of the lady of the house. Is our ghost mourning the death of her husband or visiting the spot of a more sinister event she was involved in? I will leave that to your sleuthing skills and imagine. It is a genteel house, not as grand as the large mansion houses but has a homely feel to it whilst imitating some features of the larger estates. You can read more about it on the National Trust website and I found this blog post about the ghost stories.

We also enjoyed a visit along the Antrim Coast, which will be appearing in the new novel I am working on (Thread of Life) and across the Glens to Coleraine.

A few pictures from our travels, including the Dark Hedges which took quite a few detours through the village of Stranocum to find, but was appreciated by the avid Game of Thrones members of the family.

We also visited Castle Ward and Tullymore Forest over the Easter break, two other sites used to film Game of Thrones. For anyone interested in the locations which have been used for the series you may like this link from Discover NI.

Springhill Estate

Tullymore

Shimna River, Tullymore

Mount Stewart

Mount Stewart

Dark Hedges (or King's Road)

Coleraine from Mountsandel

Castlewellan Forest Park

Castlewellan Forest

Castle Ward

A house and estate in Strangford, Co Down owned by the National Trust. Has cycling trails through woodland, fields and along the shore. I mentioned the house in a previous post as I'm fond of its dual architecture (internally and externally).

View to Portaferry

Out across Strangford Lough

Temple Water 

The farmyard

A view of the Mournes on the coastal drive back via Ardglass

National Trust - Castle Ward

Out & About

Could have called this miscellaneous pictures as it's a bit of a mish mash.

From the County Down countryside in the snow, to the zoo and castle in the Belfast Hills, Castle Ward on the Ards Peninsula and the Marble Arch Caves in Co. Fermanagh.

Since this picture was taken a set has been constructed for the filming of Game of Thrones - today you could see the scaffolding for the set just beyond the telephone pole in the distance.

Belfast Zoo

Belfast Castle

Gardens at Castle Ward, one of my favourite National Trust Houses because of it's unique design  - one side Classic and the other Gothic - internally and externally.

Inside the Marble Arch Caves (which aren't actually marble, but limestone, and no less spectacular for it). Their website does them a lot more justice than my photography skills:
http://www.marblearchcavesgeopark.com/